The city is projecting a downtrend in its Covid-19 cases in the coming days.
Mayor Benjamin Magalong said this can be gleaned from the results of the aggressive community testing and the latest epidemic risk level of the city, which was at moderate risk as of April 19.
The recent risk-based testing program conducted produced an unexpectedly low positivity rate where a total of 3,140 individuals in the high-risk sectors were tested and only 167 tested positive for a 5.3 percent positivity rate.
He said this was way below the city’s projection of a 10 to 12 percent positivity rate.
The moderate risk classification of the city was based on the two indicators: the average daily attack rate (ADAR) or the proportion of population that contracts the disease in a specified time, and the two-week growth rate (TWGR), which captures how quickly the number of cases is changing every two weeks.
In her weekly report to the management committee meeting, City Health Officer Rowena Galpo said while the city’s ADAR was high at 16 percent, its TWGR decreased by 29 percent and thus was on the low classification.
“In the last four weeks, we had an average of 98 cases a day and recently this went down to 60 a day,” Galpo said.
The city’s case recovery rate was at 84.31 percent but the fatality rate was 1.89 percent or an average of two to three deaths per day from April 13 to 19.
The mayor said the spike in the fatality rate was due to the fact that patients were often brought in for treatment too late and that there was really a shortage of medicines for severe patients. He said some of the fatalities were not originally from the city.
He said the city was able to get medicine donations last weekend but these were used up. Procurement program is now being fast-tracked.
Hospital care utilization remained at a critical level but isolation facilities at Sto. Niño Hospital, Teachers’ Camp and Baguio Convention Center still have 451 available beds out of a total of 751.
Galpo said the minimum public health standards remain to be the best weapon against the virus and its variants. – Aileen P. Refuerzo
